Learner Reviews & Feedback for Databases and SQL for Data Science with Python by IBM

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Week 1 was fine, however I want to complain about the way teaching was handled for week 2.

I am a visual and kinaesthetic learner which means that i really struggle to absorb information audibly, this is fine as in ALL previous courses of the IBM professional certification there are videos supplemented by reading materials and guided labs (I can listen to the videos, and then work my way through the labs to gain understanding of the videos.)

In this course, specifically week two, you had the video, and a lab that had the instructions "do the functions stated in the previous two videos" TWICE.

This is, to pardon my language, total garbage. You are a teaching device who apparently has not bothered to attempt to teach anyone as you can't be bothered to write a brief PDF stating what you want us to do. instead assuming that we will do all the work regardless of whether it's helping our learning or not. I am sure this works fine for some people, for plenty of others it does not.

I'm rating this as all my previous IBM data science courses were very nicely made and acommodated all learning types.I think it's a crying shame that one week has been allowed to be so much worse than the overall level of the course.

This was probably the worst course I have ever taken on coursera. Unless you have at least some basic SQL experience, DO NOT take this course. And if you are in the specialisation which requires this course, do some basic SQL from somewhere else and then come to this course. There are a lot of problems with the datasets when you try to load them into the SQL database server in IBM DB2 and most importantly, the video explanations are too hard to understand. They explain most of the things which aren't really important and don't explain things that really DO have some importance. I'm pretty good at SQL myself (said by my cousin an SQL Database Manager for over 5 years) but I still struggled a lot with problem 8, 9 and 10 of the final assignment. Any moderators seeing this, when it is possible, I beg of you, please fix this course. If I hadn't faced any of these problems, this would be a very fun and interesting course. So what happened here? Everything is explained to us like we have mastered the fundamentals already and are coming back for a revision. Truly very disappointed with this course.

I think the course needs a bit more structure and written labs, some of them just tells you to practice what you´ve seen on the videos but I think it would be much more effective if there were more labs with specific problems to solve.

Also in some of the labs some solutions are given without explanations and those havent been even mentioned on the videos or the readings

The forum is not as effective as the previous course I did of this specialization, teaching staff takes ages to answer, and also answers are not satisfactory.

Anyway, the content is interesting and I have enjoyed learning

Decent course for an introduction to SQL. Basic commands were introduced well and the Jupyter integration was great for practice.

But the course was a little too basic; could have had more application-oriented content and a steeper difficulty curve. In addition, the Analyzing data with Python video from week 3 had about 1 one minute of voiceover that was completely unrelated to SQL or databases. The voiceover was just about Sodium in Nutrition. Felt very unnecessary.

This is a shallow introduction to SQL. Python API is shown, but not used in the assignments. The videos are OK at best, and many times, the examples are not the best, in that they don't really show why one would use, say, a left join instead of full join operation in real life. The earlier weeks need more exercices. However, the final week is quite good. At least the exercices and final quiz makes you think a little.

The criteria for the final assignment is too strict to follow. If I am able to get the right result, why bother in what way I accomplish it? I believe there are many ways to build up the code without using all those DESC method or LIMIT method, and maybe it is a more convenient way. I got 99% for the course and it really makes me annoying that I have to submit over and over again for what I think I have achieved.

This was a very helpful course - reason I'm not rating it a 4 is due to a few bugs and it was quite frustrating to submit the assignments at times, especially when working in DB2 and having to drag the tables below your query scripts and then screenshot for submission. There also seems to be an issue with the bonus week (advanced sql) whereby students are not issued the honors recognition after completion.

I wanted to like this course more, but wow was it dry. There were a lot of small nuisances with having so many logins to access course material that made things frustrating at times. Although, the point is to get you accustomed to an IBM centric workflow, that when you start to learn it, its not bad. I did enjoy the final project, and found it to be the redeeming quality of this course.

Though the course content is good and covers the essential portion of SQL and also lets you try your skills on real-world data, the course video feels outdated and monotonous and makes it less interesting to watch. In Majority of videos, the instructor shows screenshots of code and its output instead of running which feels utterly passive.

All in all an ok introduction to SQL, have found other courses much more insightful and easy to follow. Course felt too fast at some points for someone without a Computer Science background. Too much attention on how to do things on the various IBM tools and writting SQL using Python rather than learning SQL itself.

The course itself was really cool. But the dataset of chicago public schools is bad (I had to change the name of all columns from lower to uppercase, and the leaders icon is all "weak" so db2 considers it as 4chars long, which is false, so I encoutered a lot of errors that i shouldn't have during this course

overall good course but my issue is that there are no notes provided to review just the videos and the labs, notes would've been a great addition to this course..also there is an issue of incorrect grade given in the peer reviewed assignment, i hope this gets rectified because it ruins the fun in learning.

Lecture slides are required. Please note that so much being taught in a small video may slip out of mind and to quickly go through so many syntax would have been possible only if lecture slides would have been provided.

It is not possible to look back into videos again if i want to confirm some syntax.

The material is fair but Week 6 should be reviewed. However, it took much more time than needed just because too many technical problems with Watson. The cloud service wasn't reliable and some packages were incompatible so many students had to find workarounds. The staff wasn't very present.

The information in the class is outstanding, the problem is IBM Jupyter Notebooks' kernels fail within 10 minutes, and must be reloaded constantly. The final exam requires 10 answers via Jupyter notebook trial and error, and it took me nearly 3 days of constant refreshing to get this done.

This course is not a complete overview of SQL by any means. You will only learn the most basic functions. The value here however is that the course guides you on how to write SQL queries in Python. To round out your SQL skills, you will need to take a more in depth beginner course.

The course content is very good. The so-called teacher-student "communication" is dreadful! I would never imagine that paying money for the course, I would be so explicitly ignored by the teaching staff for weeks! I even passed the deadlines due to multiple tech problems.

Some quizzes include questions about materials not yet introduced. The material could be much more interesting with more interesting and interactive examples. Hands-on Labs should include new materials rather than letting the students rewrite given queries in sql.

Some of the instructions in the course are not as clear as those provided by other Coursera's courses. There are some sections with outdated screenshots and typos. This disrupts the learning process and requires extra time to guess and sort out the materials.

Decent course. The SQL code is somewhat different and you need to practice it a lot. I do not think you get enough practice to really know SQL just from this course. There is only a few labs and even in there you only actually type a little bit of SQL

Less / inactive response on Discussion forums. Lots of issues that has been reported over months but not fixed. Course content is good. But Week 3 assignments, which was important for me, took ages to finish owing to error on practice environments